Normally, late October would be the brief 10-14-day happy place for sports fans in Canada.
The NHL and the NFL season would be underway. The World Series would be on the cusp of crowning a champion in MLB. The CFL season would be approaching its playoffs. And the NBA season would be about to begin.
Usually, you’d have two or three great sports options a night. Who needs anything else on your TV? If Sportsnet and TSN play their cards right, they’ll have no problem filling each of their channels with unique content.
As a bonus, by this point in the year, the days are short, the nights are cold, and some years, like this year, there’s snow on the ground by the final week of October. I’m not going to be sitting outside on my patio, reading a book, drinking a craft beer and cranking the Canadian indie rock like I do in the summer. (I’d apologize to my neighbours for any inconvenience I caused this summer, but the music was too damn good).
There was a chance that the World Series could have ended Tuesday night. If that’s the case, all we’ll have left to watch is the NFL, which plays just three days a week, and usually has multiple games on just one day.
The NHL and NBA are in their rescheduled offseasons. The CFL cancelled its season back in August.
My sports television Shangri La truly is paradise lost this year.
I’ll be frank: I’m not a big NFL guy. I’m a lifelong CFL fan. I’ve always loved the Canadian game, and I don’t pay attention to the NFL until after the Grey Cup is handed out.
So if the NFL is the only sports game in town, I’m not exactly giddy about that development. And even if I was a big NFL guy, well, there’s exhibit A about having just three days a week of NFL games.
I’ll get to watch the Breeders Cup horse races on Nov. 6 and 7. The following weekend will be the rescheduled Masters golf tournament. After that, there isn’t much to get excited about for sports on TV until the World Junior Hockey Championship starts on Boxing Day. That is, assuming there will be a World Juniors this year; right now some people are skittish about Alberta’s rise in COVID-19 cases.
Anyways, right now I have four days a week to find something to watch, on those rare quiet nights at home. I know I can sit back and watch Netflix. Still haven’t watched that Last Dance documentary about the final season of the Chicago Bulls 1990s dynasty. And there are some other good things to watch.
But thanks to ADHD, I’m not the type who can binge watch a program. And it’s so much easier to have a hockey game as background noise than Volume 2 of Unsolved Mysteries when you’re working around your home.
There is one silver lining: the slow return of the local sports scene.
I’ll refrain from rehashing my column last month about finding a happy balance between allowing more fans at games, while keeping the number of fans to a safe and reasonable amount.
It’s great that we’ve had preseason games for junior hockey and minor hockey, and that the Big Six Hockey League looks to be on track to return in November.
Hopefully, they’ll be able to have more fans than the current restrictions, especially the Estevan Bruins, who can’t possibly make ends meet with 150 fans a night.
Other sports are starting up again in town, most notably curling, which is such a big part of the Saskatchewan winter sports fabric.
I miss high school sports. It’s unfortunate that there wasn’t a fall golf season, a cross-country season, fall soccer, volleyball (a sport that Estevan has often excelled at) and football. It’s particularly sad for the football team, since this might have been the best team Estevan has had since the sport returned to Estevan at the high school level in 2009.
Perhaps we’ll be able to have some of these sports in the spring, but I’m not holding my breath.
It’s good to have sports to watch and cover this fall.
Thank God, because we don’t have much to watch on TV right now.
